'We're not churchgoers, but we prayed': Elementary school survivors of Oklahoma tornado sift through loss

Oklahoma tornado survivors sift through remains of elementary school

Isabella Rojas is seven years old. She has shoulder-length brown hair and thick glasses. When she speaks she moves her hands for emphasis, rocking from one foot to the other, making herself understood.

On Monday, in Moore, Okla., Isabella went off to school for the day at Briarwood Elementary. She was wearing a pink shirt with white stripes.

Hours later she was holding court, on camera, with a local television news reporter, waving her hands this way and that as adults moved about behind her, sifting through the devastation left behind by a tornado that cut a swath through this suburban town, killing at least 24, including several children.

“When the lights went off, we were doing some music,” Isabella said. “We lay down under our desks and then I saw all this rain coming on the window and the tornado went in, and I was so afraid that I was hanging onto one of the desks.

“I fell back. And all the dirt started getting into my eyes and into my clothes, and I really got stuck because all the desks were on top of us and the teacher — and somebody had to help her because the desk was on her leg.”

The girl and her classmates were led to safety. They were told to watch for electrical wires since they might still be live. Being pushed by the wind and hit with the dirt had “hurt,” Isabella said.

The school was badly damaged, but in a sliver of good news to emerge from a grim day no one at Briarwood Elementary was killed.

Just a short distance away, at Plaza Towers Elementary, the opposite narrative would emerge. The school was flattened. Parents were frantic. Children would be counted among the dead.

Cataclysmic weather events are nature’s terrible wonders. They remind us just how fragile life is and how much of life is beyond human control. We can plan for catastrophes. Schoolchildren in Oklahoma, which sits in the heart of “Tornado Alley,” drill for disasters. They learn to cover their heads and duck under their desks.

But it is left to fate, or luck, or simple happenstance, to determine the larger question: why one person gets to live with the memory of a tragic event while the next person gets mourned as being among the dead.

Barbara Garcia, an elderly woman with a floral-print shirt, was counted among the living on Monday afternoon in Moore. Her home, however, was a pile of debris, broken wood and scattered appliances. She pointed to her “pressure cooker,” a glint of metal amid all the junk. Her arms were etched in scrapes as she spoke to a CBS reporter, watch the video clip below.

“I know exactly what happened here,” she said.

Ms. Garcia said she had been preparing for the tornado for years. And when the world turned black she hid in her bathroom, sitting on a stool, clutching her dog, a little black schnauzer. That was always her plan.

“[The tornado] was there and it was gone,” she said. “There was just no time. And then it was light outside and I thought, ‘Well, I’m OK.’ ”

In the wake of the killer winds, she was left staring up at the sky, covered in a thin layer of rubble. Alive. But her dog was nowhere to be found until, mid-interview, a person off camera pointed to it — struggling through the mess that had been Ms. Garcia’s house to reach its mistress.

Christina Morris, another dazed survivor, spoke to a reporter from her front porch. She had huddled in a tiny bedroom closet with her four-year-old niece and her husband when the tornado struck. Their home shook and shuddered, but remained intact.

“We’re not churchgoers, but we prayed,” she said. “We prayed to my mother to watch over us. She passed away a few years ago.”

The ruined homes of Moore will, in time, presumably be rebuilt. But the why behind what happened there will never be adequately answered, and so it is left to the living to sift through the stories of loss in search of meaning.

Stories like that of little Isabella Rojas, holding on tight, and Christina Morris praying to her dead mother to keep her safe and Barbara Garcia, an elderly woman in a floral print shirt, finding her little black dog amid the ruins of her home.

“I thought God had answered one of my prayers to let me be OK,” Ms. Garcia said.
“But he answered both of them because this was my second prayer.”

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